Building Champions

Rubber City Weightlifting shares training space with the powerlifters at Unrivaled Strength. I was talking to a young powerlifter recently and asked him why he was doing a light squat variant I had not seen him do before. He offered some half-hearted explanation, then confessed that he did it because he was bored with his training. I've heard this many times before, but mostly from fitness types who are "working out" rather than training to a specific goal, such as winning a weightlifting or powerlifting competition. However, I read more and more articles aimed at serious athletes that offer up alternative approaches to "relieve the boredom of their usual training routine."

I can think of no worse reason to change your training than boredom.There are valid reasons to change your training--progress has stalled, working around injury, focus on weak links, unloading by exercise--but boredom doesn't make the list. Training is not meant to entertain you or distract you, its purpose is to drive physiological changes that will enhance performance in your chosen sport. Training makes demands on your energy reserves for work inside the gym and recovery outside the gym. That energy should not be wasted on poorly conceived and inefficient exercises or haphazard methods chosen by your mood. Planning training is difficult and precise work, even at the intermediate level, and it should not be subject to whim or it's failure to hold your attention.

Only a handful of exercises have the power to drive the stress/adaptation cycle consistently. They are those that move the most weight over the greatest range of motion and involve the most muscle mass: squats, deadlifts, cleans, snatches, jerks, presses, bench presses, and perhaps their major variants. They are time-tested ways to build real strength and, as confirmed by a hundred or more years of experience, not debatable They are used as sporting tests of strength because they build the most strength.

Given that these are the best exercises to build muscle mass and strength, why would you change your training away from them out of boredom? Load can vary, frequency can vary, exercise order can vary, but for most lifters, the exercises will be the same, over and over and over again. Weightlifters cannot say they have really dialed in their technique in the snatch, clean, or jerk until they have tens of thousands of lifts under their belts. Ask any powerlifter how they got to 700 pound back squat and they will tell you they spent years under the bar, not months, to get there. A high tolerance for monotony is a bedrock requirement of progress in the strength sports.

If squats, cleans, snatches, bench presses, and deadlifts, week after week, month after month, year after year, bore you, succeeding in weightlifting or powerlifting will be difficult indeed. Maybe you can get away from them for a short time, but to become truly strong, you'll have to do them until you find yourself dreaming of doing them, hook gripping your steering wheel, and reflexively setting your back just to pick up a package. "Bored" will only exist in your lexicon as a way to describe the uncommitted. ​